By the way, it could be that one of your numbers has "space" in them. in
which case, R tends to turn the entire vector into a factor. try opening the
file in a spreadsheet like excel, and do "search replace" on " " with "".
and see how many it catches.


Tal





On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 7:25 AM, ojal john owino <
ojal.johnowino@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Dear Users,
> I have a variable in my dataset which is of type factor. But it actually
> contains numeric entries which like 5.735  4.759 ..... This is because the
> data was read from a CSV file into R and this variable contained other
> charaters which were not numeric. I have now dropped the records with the
> characters which are not numeric for this variable and want to change it to
> numeric srotage type.
>
> I have tried using as.numeric() function but it changes the values in the
> variable to what I think are the ranks of the individual values of the
> varible in the dataset. For example if 5.735 is the current content in the
> field, then the new object created by as.numeric will contain a value like
> 680 if the 5.735 was the highest value for the varible and the dataset had
> 680 records.
>
>
> How can I change the storage type without changing the contents of this
> variable in this case?
>
> Thanks for your consideration.
>
>
>
> --
> Ojal John Owino
> P.O Box 230-80108
> Kilifi, Kenya.
> Mobile:+254 728 095 710
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



-- 
----------------------------------------------


My contact information:
Tal Galili
Phone number: 972-50-3373767
FaceBook: Tal Galili
My Blogs:
www.talgalili.com
www.biostatistics.co.il

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


